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Meet India's male FEMinists

The campaign to criminalise marital rape isn't just being fought by women activists. The Forum to Engage Men is also working hard to change male mindsets about gender equality

| TNN | Oct 1, 2017, 02:00 IST

Illustration credit: Chad Crowe

Recently, a petition to remove an exception in the Indian penal law that doesn't consider sexual intercourse with a wife below 15 years of age as rape, made headlines for two different reasons. While the central government told the Delhi High Court that criminalising marital rape would "destabilise the institution of marriage" and become a tool for harassing husbands, a group of Indian men came forward to support the petition with a starkly different argument.
"We believe that there are men, and there are better men. The marital rape exception takes away the rights of our wives to say no, and as such also takes away their right to say yes to consensual sexual intercourse, whether it is procreational or recreational. We are and represent men who enter into marriage as an equal partnership and stand for the basic, indivisible and inter-related rights of both partners to equality, freedom from violence and dignity," the Forum to Engage Men (FEM) said in its petition.

The decision to implead in the marital rape petition is the first time that FEM has taken a proactive public stand on an issue. But behind the scenes, it has been working on issues of gender equality and masculinity in more than 10 states. As a pan-India informal network of activists, researchers and academics, FEM partners with grassroots-level organisations such as Men's Action for Equity (MAE) in Jharkhand, MAVA (Men Against Violence and Abuse) and Samyak in Maharashtra and MASVAW (Men's Action for Stopping Violence Against Women) in Uttar Pradesh, and women's organisations like Jagori, for community-level gender training programmes for men.

For instance, an innovative programme called Kishor Varta invites young boys and men from villages near Bundi and Udaipur in Rajasthan to dial a toll-free number to listen to interactive audio stories in Hindi on child marriage, puberty and menstruation. Project manager Rimjhim Jain says, "It opens up a space for adolescent boys to reflect on and question gender roles they see around them." Many of them now help out with domestic work and support their sisters' right to education, though they often face ridicule, she adds.

Srimati Basu, who teaches gender studies at the University of Kentucky, points out that FEM's approach is inherently different from anti-feminist organisations. "They are relying on the idea that sexism is as harmful to men's moral and mental development as it is to women," says Basu.

In a TED talk last year, activist Kamla Bhasin too spoke about "emotional castration" of men, arguing that violence against women was closely linked to the way in which patriarchy dehumanises men. "Men need to understand that till women are free, they won't be free either, that they need to take the leadership in the fight against patriarchy to save their own humanity," Bhasin said.

A significant argument in FEM's petition on marital rape focuses on how men are socialised to believe that "they are entitled to sex with women at their will", and how gender training programmes help them realise that this amounts to violence against women and leads to a change of behaviour. Dr Abhijit Das, one of FEM's founders, says, "Our work in the community made us realise that men do understand the issue of respect, after which they had better and more caring sexual relationships with their partners."

Gender equality spilled over to personal relationships as well, with men sharing domestic workload, childcare, contraception and reproductive responsibilities. The transition is not easy. Sanjay Singh, a professor at Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith in Varanasi and member of MASVAW, says a lot of men incur anger and ridicule from their families when they change their behaviour. "My own father started saying that I had become a joru ka ghulam and even asked me to leave the house," he says.

But such obstacles don't deter FEM activists. Recently, they launched the Ek Saath campaign in 12 states to train and involve 6,000 male volunteers who can work as gender equality advocates or Samanta Saathis to change discriminatory norms in their respective communities.

Gender equality is a collaborative effort, adds Das. "Slowly, we have to raise a different generation of boys in which we don't build a sense of privilege."

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